Shanghai had changed. We sensed that the moment we came ashore.
Extraterritoriality was long gone; we had known that, of course. The
days of exploitation, of clubs where Chinese and Burmese and Indian
servants waited on Britons and Americans were passed. Pan-Asia had seen
to that. This was 1965. The white man's burden in the east had been upon
brown and yellow shoulders for over sixteen years now, and the Indians
and Burmese and Indonesians were ruling themselves, after their fling at
communism in the fifties.
The initial bitterness which followed the debacle of 1955 had passed, we
were glad to see. Porters no longer spat in the faces of white men. They
were polite, but we had not been in the city a half hour before we
sensed something else. There was an edge to that politeness. It was as
Major Reid had written before we left San Francisco--a subtle change
had come over Asia in the previous few years. They smiled--they waited
on us--they bent over backwards to atone for the excesses of the first
years of freedom from foreign rule; but through it all was an air of
aloofness, of superior knowledge.
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